


Hour Hand’s Gone and Now You’re Feeling Strange

by anistarrose



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Nightmares, Same Coin Theory (Gravity Falls), alcohol mention, physical illness/nausea, warnings for:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 23:39:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19030285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anistarrose/pseuds/anistarrose
Summary: Memories of a previous life return to Stan late at night. (Based off theSame Coin Theory.)





	Hour Hand’s Gone and Now You’re Feeling Strange

**Author's Note:**

> Aside from the Same Coin Theory, this fic is also heavily inspired by the song You’re At the Party by Lemon Demon, which is the source of the title. The song has always given me huge Bill vibes, so I figured it was about time to finally write something about it!
> 
> (Can be taken as canon to [Some Sunny Day,](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14947964/chapters/34636421) but there’s no need to read one to understand the other.)

The red glow of his alarm clock tells Stan that it’s 3:59, but the strobe lights so bright his windowshade can’t block them and the never-ending, deafening bass line that sends his whole room vibrating tell him that he’s still no closer to sleep than he was an hour ago.

_Fucking teenagers — what the hell do they think they’re doing, partying so close to the Mystery Shack before the fucking asscrack of dawn —_

He buries his head in his pillow, clapping hands over his ears, but they do nothing to muffle the sound. His back protests each time he rolls over, until his spine feels just as twisted and contorted as the sheets his legs are tangled up in, and the ache travels up his back and to the base of his skull, where it intensifies into a violent throbbing sensation that resonates with the bass line. 

He breaks into a sweat. It’s one of those unforgivingly hot, humid May nights from which Stan always wakes up drenched, one of those nights that would be sickening enough even without the world coming to an end just outside his door.

The euphoric screeches outside are abruptly drowned out by an agonized wail, and Stan thinks he might throw up — but before he can disentangle himself from his sheets and hobble to a trash can, the walls burst into bright blue flames.

Sweat beading on his face so quickly that he’s afraid he’ll choke on it and drown, he moves a trembling hand towards the fire. It _can’t_ be real, it _must_ just be a figment of his imagination — but it feels blistering hot even from a distance, hot like it’ll melt his very soul away… 

His splayed hand lands on a solid, cool wall, vibrating so hard that it makes his teeth chatter. He withdraws his hand quickly, and something crumbles between his thumb and index finger as he rubs them together — paint chips, he realizes after a flash of the strobe light illuminates them, cracked and peeled off the wall by the sheer intensity of the music.

There’s a resounding crash from upsettingly close — probably right near the foot of the stairs — and Stan feels the bile rising in his throat.

_They got in the Shack. What the fuck kind of partiers_ are _these?_

Ignoring the illusory flames, he staggers to his feet and pulls a baseball bat out from beneath his bed.

_I’ll show them what happens to people who keep me up all night and then break in to try and wreck my shit._

He barrels down the stairs, swinging at the first thing he sees move, but his bat passes through it with hardly any resistance, and the intruder’s amorphous dark form splatters on the steps like oil. There’s more of them, though — creatures of all shapes and sizes, but with all their features equally obscured by shadow aside from their dull red eyes.

Stan tightens his grip on the bat, and all the eyes narrow in unison. Some are large and others small, some round and some angular, but each and every one is fixed on him.

He turns tail and tries to run back up the stairs, but he slips on the oily remnants of the first creature, and topples down onto the steps as his legs fly out from under him. He doesn’t have time to process the pain before he feels alien hands running over him, some curling around his fingers and others grasping handfuls of his shirt, but all of them united in dragging him back down towards the ground floor as his head bounces on step after step.

The pain is hitting him now, but it isn’t making him cringe like it should. In a detached sort of way, he almost finds it _funny_.

_King!_ the creatures whisper, almost reverently. _Join us once more! Reclaim your throne!_

Stan tears his fist out of a cool, scaly grip, and punches straight through the nearest thing that feels half-tangible. He doesn’t stop punching until his knuckles graze something wooden and cylindrical, and he grabs ahold of his baseball bat again, swinging it in a wide arc as he struggles to his feet and ascends the stairs facing backwards, barely able to hold off the assault. He slams the door to his room closed and heaves his dresser in front of it, then crumples to the ground with his back against the wall and tries to catch his breath —

The screech of microphone feedback from outside deafens him as his window shatters, flat shards of glass spilling across the floor in front of him. Almost all the pieces are oddly regular, tiny flat squares and pentagons and _triangles_ —

A bitter taste so strong he could choke on it pervades his mouth and throat, and he shuts his eyes tight but still sees a blue flame light up in front of him, and feels long, cold fingers intertwine with his own.

_What’s happening to me?_

_**(WELCOME BACK TO THE PARTY!)** _

**__**_Is this just a nightmare? Will I wake up any second now —_

The fire engulfing his hands now fills his veins too, turning them to tingling puppet strings that stretch up his arms and down his legs, jerking him up to his feet. It creeps up his neck, slips through a crack in his skull, and fills his mind with a cold blue blaze —

He’s at the heart of the party, and he’s been here before.

_Got to wake up —_

_**(TOO LATE!)** _

The lawless revelry of fiends and abominations surrounds him, and he dances alongside them, bright green liquid sloshing in his cup and spilling down his face. The shadow obscuring their features begins to subside as he drinks, fading from a uniform black to an uneven gray, and he can begin to make out bloodied claws and drooling orifices, chipped teeth and crimson eyes where teeth and eyes should clearly not be.

He gets a face full of pyrotechnics and laughs it off, and then his laugh turns into a cackle, and then into a discordant electronic screech that shatters the few remaining windows. He _is_ the party, he is the nuisance. He’s the monster to end all monsters, and it’s _not_ a nightmare. 

Something catches his eye — a shimmering sphere hanging from the ceiling, beams of all colors of light shooting out of it. But it’s no disco ball — no, its shape is cloudlike and amorphous, constantly shifting as the galaxy pattern inside distorts.

He _needs_ it. The party won’t be complete without it in his hands. With it, he can get out of this crumbling shack and take his chaos worldwide.

He steps towards it, and his touch immediately disintegrates the bat-winged abomination that’s foolish enough to fly in his way. Even over the roar of partygoers reveling in his monstrous glory, he can hear the cloud hissing unnaturally, like it’s a hole his strobe lights and pyrotechnics have burnt in the fabric of the universe itself.

His index finger grazes the rift, and he jolts awake in bed with a throbbing head, a pounding heart, and a convulsing stomach.

“Fucking… nightmare…” he whispers aloud as he gasps for breath, and slowly sets to work extricating himself from the sheet he finds his legs ensnared in. The digital clock at his bedside reads 5:15.

_One measly hour of sleep, and_ all _of it felt like shit…_

He can’t bring himself to go back to bed, not with the songs from the party and the nightmare still echoing in his ears, grating on his skull and quickening his heart rate.

_Was the party outside even real?_ he wonders. _Was all of it a dream?_

_~~…or was none of it?~~ _

He’s on his feet again now, hand resting on the doorknob, but he doesn’t dare twist it open. It’s cold on his fingers, and heavy like lead.

“The fuck is wrong with you, Stanley,” he mutters. “It was just a nightmare.”

_~~It wasn’t.~~ _

“There’s no one out there. Just open it. What are you, a five-year-old? You might as well be scared of the monsters under your bed.”

Stubbornly, his hand still refuses to twist the knob. Something downstairs creaks — and yeah, the Shack makes inexplicable but harmless noises all the time, but if any day was to be different, it would be today…

He cracks the door to peer down the hallway, sees nothing alarming, and swings it further open, making his way down the stairs cautiously. No bloodthirsty monsters nor unruly teenagers assault him — if anything, the hallway unnerves him more because of how dusty, and poorly lit, and altogether _dead_ it looks.

The scene outside the Shack looks similarly dead, he realizes as he reaches the ground floor and heads to the kitchen. No warm morning light shines in through the windows — just a sickly green glow emanating from somewhere just out of sight, illuminating the underside of dark red clouds that stretch as far as the eye could see. No birds are chirping, either, nor are any other woodland creatures scuttling about. 

_A storm must be brewing._

The thought brings Stan delight in a way that it shouldn’t, and his stomach churns upon recognizing the emotion as not his own. He coughs — an immediate involuntary reflex, trying to rid his system of this unnatural euphoria — and feels acid burn his throat. He can’t bear the thought of eating, but he needs something to dull the hammering pain at the base of his skull and drown out these alien thoughts infiltrating his mind, so he clumsily rummages through the fridge for a beer.

He comes up empty-handed, though, and remembers that he opened the last one the previous evening. It’s still sitting in the sink, half-empty and almost certainly a gag-worthy room temperature by now — but it’s all he has, so he picks it up and opens his mouth…

The glass neck of the bottle feels flimsy in his grip, and he squeezes it so tight that it shatters, sending alcohol spilling down the drain and glass shards skittering all across the counter and floor. It’s pouring outside now, waves of rain pounding on the roof with the rhythm of a panicked heartbeat, and Stan looks to the nearest clock only to see that all the hands — second, minute, and hour — have disappeared.

He goes lightheaded as a tremor from the basement tears up the floorboards beneath his feet, and he’s thrown backwards, striking the wall and collapsing into a kneeling position. An eye-scorching bright light beams through the jagged gashes in the floor, and he’s lifted into the air —

He raises his hands in front of him, and finds them cloaked in blue fire. His fingers are cold and tingling, like an asleep limb regaining proper blood flow for the first time in hours, and he watches them stretch out, turning thin and black and featureless.

His face contorts, lips pulling back from bared teeth to display a wide, delirious smile.

_**(WELCOME BACK, NIGHTMARE KING!)** _

He wants to shut his eyes but he _can’t_. They’re already shut as tight as they can be, but he’s still seeing these things —

_**(TOO LATE! YOU’VE BEEN INVITED!)** _

The Mystery Shack is on fire, the whole town is on fire, and he and his entourage are dancing in the ruins. A giant X slices through the sky, shifting in color from an opalescent yellow-green to a nebulous purple, and the edges of the rift drip orange like the universe itself is bleeding. When he lays his eye upon it, he only grows more delirious as memories that have spent a lifetime buried finally resurface.

It’s not a nightmare, but _he_ is.

The monsters are visible in all their grotesque horror now, devoid of any obscuring shadows, but he hardly even pays them any mind as he grows increasingly drunk on recognition and high on irony. He really is the lifeblood of the festivities, the sun at the center of its orbit — every party that never ends needs a host that never dies, and that’s exactly what he is. He can’t stay down for long.

With a snap of his fingers, he raises a castle from beneath the debris-filled streets of the town, levitating it into the sky and lifting the revelers up with it. 

_Claim your throne! Claim your throne!_ they chant. _Nightmare King!_

The throne is built of a thousand screaming faces, petrified and doomed to eternal terror. He lights the seat ablaze with a flick of his hand, and his eye deforms into a mouth to take a sip of a bright red beverage that burns his lips as he drinks and singes his eyelids as his face transforms back. Cackling, he lowers himself down to sit —

Stan wakes up, for real this time, and doesn’t remember anything.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, comments are appreciated as always!


End file.
